In the service of diversion

I really like to try and post a blog entry a day. That’s my goal. I don’t always meet it, but it’s what I shoot for. Now that school and work are in full swing it’s getting to be a bit tougher. It’s not that I don’t have the time. It doesn’t take all that long to write up an entry, plus since it’s something I actually enjoy doing, it’s not hard to make the time. It’s inspiration that gets to be the problem. Sometimes it’s difficult to experience enough interesting stuff in a 24 hour period to write a post.

One basic rule I try and follow is not to post anything that is too work related. That just seems like a good practice. Currently my days consist of go to work, go to class, do homework, and sleep. It’s not that my classes aren’t fun and exciting (actually it kind of is) but they don’t often produce grade-A blog material. And trust me, it’s not that I don’t try and force them to be. This week I scrapped a blog entry I was writing about Entity Relationship diagrams because I couldn’t make it work. I was trying to diagram out the abstract nature of “Your Mother” joke via the ER diagram method. I think it’s a funny concept but the actual implementation left a bit to be desired. I keep thinking I’ll get around to writing a post were I use natural deduction to imply that Ruby has a tail. The proof is logically sound.

The closest thing I came to an interesting observation last night was a passage from my Formal Methods book. The passage in question was an aside explaining where the “=” sign came from. I’ll post it for your perusal:

The ‘=’ symbol is due to Robert Recorde, whose textbook on algebra The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557, used the symbol for the first time. Recorde argued that a pair of parallel lines of the same length were suitable as the symbol for equality `bicause noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle'.

I thought it was kind of funny that the old English looked a whole lot like LOLCAT speak. Perhaps LOLCAT is actually retro? If we translated Beowulf into modern English then into LOLCAT could a high school student figure out which was original English and which was LOLCAT? The LOLCATerbury Tales? I could go on attempting to mine the rich vein that is LOLCAT humor but I suspect I’ll only find “fool’s humor.”

The weekend is coming up though. I often mentally bankroll the beginning of the week’s blog entries over the weekend. Unfortunately those are normally entries where I complain about things. But perhaps I’ll have some amusing antidotes to share next week…